OTOH, maybe the GOP wouldn’t be like that, or wouldn’t be nearly so powerful, if their voters hadn’t been fed a steady diet of hateful lies for the last 40 years.
We’re so afraid of the wrong people having the power to limit speech that we’ve instead given them unlimited power to lie. Everything is a trade-off, and the goal shouldn’t be to absolutely prevent a certain kind of abuse of power, but to prevent the worst abuses of all kinds of power, even if it means certain specific abuses are easier. What we have now is like barricading the front door while leaving the back door standing open.
I totally agree. We wouldn’t be in this mess if Reagan hadn’t tossed the Fairness Doctrine out the window. Gee I wonder why he did such a thing. /s
But here we are. And so getting back on track I think, yes, we need to slightly curtail free speech when it relates to very carefully specified things like public officials inciting violence and specific forms of hate speech because of their significant danger to the public and our institutions of government.
But I think we aren’t going to get far with that until, as I think you are implying, we bring back the Fairness Doctrine so Fox “News” and OANN and Breitbart and, frankly, some of the similarly bullshit left wing “news” (looking at the media bias chart) like Occupy Democrats or Palmer Report, say.
Once we can get news bias in check, then, after maybe a generation, we won’t have as many gullible lunatics voting and it will be less likely for right wing extremists to gain seats in congress and wreck everything.
OTOH, maybe the GOP wouldn’t be like that, or wouldn’t be nearly so powerful, if their voters hadn’t been fed a steady diet of hateful lies for the last 40 years.
We’re so afraid of the wrong people having the power to limit speech that we’ve instead given them unlimited power to lie. Everything is a trade-off, and the goal shouldn’t be to absolutely prevent a certain kind of abuse of power, but to prevent the worst abuses of all kinds of power, even if it means certain specific abuses are easier. What we have now is like barricading the front door while leaving the back door standing open.
I totally agree. We wouldn’t be in this mess if Reagan hadn’t tossed the Fairness Doctrine out the window. Gee I wonder why he did such a thing. /s
But here we are. And so getting back on track I think, yes, we need to slightly curtail free speech when it relates to very carefully specified things like public officials inciting violence and specific forms of hate speech because of their significant danger to the public and our institutions of government.
But I think we aren’t going to get far with that until, as I think you are implying, we bring back the Fairness Doctrine so Fox “News” and OANN and Breitbart and, frankly, some of the similarly bullshit left wing “news” (looking at the media bias chart) like Occupy Democrats or Palmer Report, say.
Once we can get news bias in check, then, after maybe a generation, we won’t have as many gullible lunatics voting and it will be less likely for right wing extremists to gain seats in congress and wreck everything.